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I sometimes thought he had been too much influenced by Leopardi; he was always quoting him. That is the way with many of our young men. Yet Emilio was a Christian a sincere believer. It would have been better if he had married. But he gave all his affection to me and Teresa and to this place and the people. I was to carry on his work but I am an old woman and very tired.
They wrote that he had been learning Italian, with a view to being useful to me, and so on; but when he came out, what was he but a fine gentleman never had put his hand to a pick, nor a blasting-iron; and as to his Italian, he told me it was the Italian of Alfieri and Leopardi.
Dutch art possesses one quality that renders it particularly attractive to us Italians: it is that branch of the world's art which differs most from the Italian school, it is the antithesis, or, to use a phrase that enraged Leopardi, "the opposite pole in art."
Leopardi, the poet of sorrow, of annihilation, having lost the ultimate illusion, that of believing in his immortality Peri l'inganno estremo ch'eterno io mi credei,
They maddened him, and, at the same time, by that strange contradiction which is characteristic of all jealousy, he hungered and thirsted to prove them. He alighted from his cab at the corner he had named to his cabman, and from which point he could watch the Rue Leopardi, in which was his rival's house.
"Was it not on her account that you went to the Rue Leopardi to provoke your rival? For she is not even true to you, and it is justice. Was it not on her account that you wished to enter the house, in spite of that rival's brother-in-law, and that a dispute arose between you, followed by this challenge?
And, in spite of her uneasiness, the wicked woman trembled with delight at the thought of her work. When Maud Gorka left the house on the Rue Leopardi she walked on at first rapidly, blindly, without seeing, without hearing anything, like a wounded animal which runs through the thicket to escape danger, to escape its wounds, to escape itself.
Many foreign ladies hunt for it in order to put flowers on the sepulcher of a hunch-back who made verses, Giacomo Leopardi." The silence with which his two clients received these explanations made him abandon his mechanical oratory in order to take a good look at them. The gentleman was taking the lady's hand and was pressing it, speaking in a very low tone.
He might wound, he might, perhaps, kill his rival, and his passion would be satisfied, or else he would risk being killed himself, and the courage he would display braving death would suffice to raise him in his own estimation. A mad thought possessed him and caused him to hasten toward the Rue Leopardi, to provoke his rival suddenly and before Madame Steno!
With all drawbacks, he had enjoyed his life, had found it abundantly worth living. And, after all, was not Leopardi himself a witness to the life he rejected, to the Nature he denounced. Ferrier recalled his cry to his brother: "Love me, Carlo, for God's sake! I need love, love, love! fire, enthusiasm, life." "Fire, enthusiasm, life." Does the human lot contain these things, or no?
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